Andrew Robertson (BBDO) | How to Power Up Your Organization

28:03And I kind of put what's worked in one and what I see has worked and what more importantly, what hasn't worked in the other to come up with what you just said, something that is, I hope, practical. I can take this away and build this into the way I operate my company. And with that, I should get some good ideas. So Robertson on creativity would have been great. But this idea of the ship, an intentional shift from unconsciously suppressing to consciously unlocking the creativity of the people is kind of what I want to do. Yeah, no, and that is the core of the book. And so, no, it is a good name.

28:41You tell a lot of great stories in the book about leaders managing this creative shift, what you've learned from them, things that you've been in the middle of. As you step back from all of the leaders, Andrew, that you have known in your long career, who would you highlight as one who has managed the creative shift exceptionally well? I think Jeff Imelt. I thought you'd say that. And he took a company that literally wrote the book on compliance, Six Sigma, zero non-compliance. That was a thing. And a company that was really good at buying other companies and selling them and doing all of this.

29:21And he reinvented it as a company that generated billion-dollar ideas for new products and new services behind that whole idea of imagination at work. And particularly, actually, when you realise what he was going through at time, you know, the level of pressure that he was under and the issues he was dealing with and the governments and the, you know, he had so many good reasons not to get around to that, and yet he made it a central part of the way GE developed. So I think when you look at the complexity and scale and ease with which it could have been anything but that, and then the way he actually really did make the shift, I think that's a pretty remarkable story.

30:05It is. And look at GE today, right? It's worked. Yeah. His book, which I think, I mean, I think it's really good. It's called The Hot Seat. He has this great line in it, which is truth equals facts plus context. And the facts are the facts. Everybody can see those, but you can't always see the context. And if you understand the context, then the truth becomes pretty remarkable.

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31:43You talk a lot in the book about multipliers and diminishers, a concept borrowed from Liz Wiseman's book, Multipliers, and it's a good one. Could you talk again, a similar question, who in your career has been an exceptional multiplier? The good news is there are more great multipliers. We'll get to the diminishers in a minute, but let's stay with this one. I mean, I will say you, Jim. I mean, we worked together a long, long time ago, but I think you're a great example of a multiplier. I think you did it within P &G and you did it with your external parts, which is, I guess, multipliers are multipliers, whoever they're working with.

32:21But I think you did. I really do. I think Antonio Lucio is a multiplier as an individual. There's a good list of multipliers. And I'm not going to tell you who the diminishes. No, thank you for that, Andrew. But the question I have in diminishers is not who has been a diminisher, but we all know them. You have them internally at your company and you've had them at clients. How do you handle that and still, especially with a client, and still get to the outcome that you can be proud of and that makes a difference? I think that awareness is nine-tenths of the solution. If you are conscious of the fact that that's what you're dealing with, you can do two things.

33:02One is you can make sure you don't get diminished by it and your ideas and thoughts don't get that you don't play to it if you're aware that that's what you're dealing with just don't let yourself play to it whereas if you're not aware of it you'll find yourself conforming and and falling into it and then the second thing is i think you know you have to learn how to frame things how to frame things and set things up in such a way that the diminisher is going to feel like he or she is winning. And it doesn't exist in, I guess it's the equivalent of a QB sneak where you just have a ball and you somehow find your way through and nobody knows that you even had the ball under your jersey.

33:51Again, if you're conscious of it, you can think that through as opposed to just running at it the same way that you would run at everything else. I think that not enough time, if you break the three bits, defining the problem, we don't spend enough time on. Coming up with a solution, we probably do spend it. We don't spend enough time on working out how to make the solution come to life. What are the things you have to do to get it through an organization, an individual? Everybody deals with this. And I don't think in general, we think about it strategically enough. We tend to just run at it and treat it as the way life is.

34:31And it doesn't have to be like that. I love the story about your early time at BBDO, where you pulled together a bunch of your people who were doing great work to list the behavioral qualities that describe BBDO as best people. And that led to principles for your leadership behavior network-wide. It's just such a simple and such a powerful idea. So could you talk a bit about that, why it was so extraordinarily effective, and how did you keep those principles alive over your 20-year tenure as head of that network? So I got tired of sitting in meetings where people would say, you know, people are the most important asset we have, and we need to make sure we have the right people.

35:16And then when I said, what are the right people? I'd either get no answer or worse than that, I would get, you know, the description that you get from the unsolicited emails from somebody who's off to adopt. We're looking for self-starting team players who are focused on results. And I thought, there has to be a better way than this. And I was also at that stage, you know, dealing with a network BBO around the world. We had a lot of agencies that were still being run by the founders of those agencies, but And yet they're part of this network. So I thought we need to come up with something that is definitely ours.

35:52It has to be ours. And I'm borrowing one of your phrases, the fruits and the roots. I got the 20 people who I thought did best for BBDO around the world. I brought them together and I allocated half a day for this because I figured it was one of those things which if I allowed it to be three days, it would take three days. So I allocated half a day. And the question, what are the 10 characteristics that describe the people who do best in and do best for BBDO? That was a question I wanted to solve. And what was remarkable was it took 40 minutes. The list was they helped make the work better. Their clients love them.

36:36They don't just respect them. They love them. They are hand raisers, not finger pointers. They are we, not me. They present well. They pick themselves up fast. This is a business where it's easy to get. You can't avoid the knocks. What matters is how quickly you pick yourself up. They're closers. It's a business where there's an awful lot of people who have good meetings. The best people get to it, yes or no. They're radiators, not drains. Some of the most brilliant people that you meet, and Alan Rosenstein's wonderful words, suck the heat out of the Sahara. We want radiators, not drains. They do the right thing.

37:11they have a healthy paranoia in a business where people sell for a living. It's very easy to keep convincing each other that everything's fantastic. And the best people, this group identified the best people had a healthy paranoia. They were always worried about what they didn't know, what they couldn't see. And then we added one in the end, which is, you know, they actively seek out different, but it only took 40 minutes. We wrote them down on a post-it note and they were us. They were us. They were ours. They were written in our words. And it was really just a question of digging into the reality of what was best about the best people and codifying it.

37:53Because it was true and because it was true to us, it was actually really easy to have it infiltrate the organization. It got adopted because it made sense and it was useful. or we didn't have t-shirts, we didn't have posters on the walls with them, we didn't have any of that stuff. But people started using these phrases. They would say, oh, he's a bit of heat, not me, or he's a bit of a drain of a radiator, or whatever it was. It just moved into the vernacular. And it was because of that that it stayed there. In answer to your question for 20 years, it stayed there because everybody was using it.

38:28Everybody was using it all the time to talk about people and their behavior, talk about people we were trying to hire or talk about how people were performing. This just became the language. And language culture is so much about language. This language that we developed in 40 minutes. The culture was already there. What it helped to do was articulate what it was, and then people could work with it. You know, I get so frustrated when I see descriptions of the culture that people claim they're trying to make. And it's just a load of generic words that everybody uses all the time. And you're better off with something that may not even be as good as long as it's yours, as long as it's yours.

39:11And people know it's yours. And the language that came out of that was just so simple, so human. It wasn't corporate speak. It's like things that would come up in a coffee among your people. And I think that's also what made it stick. As you said, it was yours. Yeah. And it was yours in terms of tone and spirit, and that's why it stuck. But anyway, I think for our listeners, it's just such a good idea. And that's what I love about the book. There are so many things like that in the book, just stuff you can pick up, the principles behind it, and do it. And I think the key to that is, again, it's what's the right question?

39:48So many people have run sessions with groups where they said, what is the culture we want to create? What do we want to be? And flipping that and just saying, if we just look at the people who do best in and do best for, what are they like? What do they do? How do we describe them? That's the truth. That's the truth of the organization. Different question. Different question. You talk in the book quite a bit about BBDO India. And if you go to the index, you see it appear, I don't know, six, seven, eight times. It seems like such a remarkable organization within a larger remarkable organization.

40:27So could you talk a bit about what has gone on, what goes on in that place that results in such remarkable work? Many P &G brands have benefited from that incredible group of people. So what could we learn from what's going on in that subculture? So DVDO India is one of the most remarkable little gems in our organization. It's not a big agency, pretty small agency, but it's led, I use the word carefully, it's led by a wonderful guy called Josie Paul. And we found Josie working, he was working at the time for an agency called David, which was part of it was the challenger part of ogilvy and ogilvy in india was an enormous agency he was working the challenger but and we persuaded him to come and start bbdo india for the first three months he was running the he was the agency but he was running it from a car with a cell phone he did at an office i've got a photograph somewhere of him bleeding out of the car but josey has extraordinary humility, extraordinary curiosity, and extraordinary generosity.

41:39And he kind of brings all three of those things to his people and to his clients. And when they eventually did get an office in Mumbai, he recreated Gandhi's ashram, basically. And he said, we're not even going to call it an agency and office. We're going to call it an ashram. It's a place of learning. A place of learning. And he had all these wonderful symbols, the loom and stuff. And I think he just got no ego, all as I say, curiosity and generosity and just a remarkable human being. And what that means is that people want to do good things with him. They want to do good things for him. And that's true, as I said, of his people and of his clients.

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43:31Andrew, let's flip into the creative brief. And the first question I have for you is, do you have another book in you? I don't think I do. I don't think I do. I mean, I may have one. I'm just not sure I can be bothered with getting it up. It's hard. It is hard. Did you enjoy the process? It's a different rhythm, right? When I wrote my book, you had to go into a place of solitude at some point, deciding the brand architecture of the book or the book architecture? What can you write that no one else can that will be a value to this world? I mean, these are all difficult questions. And if you want to write a great book, you have to say yes to all of that.

44:11Yeah. I actually enjoyed the process up until reading the first draft. And when I read the first draft, I hated it. And I literally called the agent and said, I'm pulling the plug. We've got to cancel it and pay the advance back. And she was great. She said, that's okay. Let's take a breath. This happens. When you write it, and I'm sure you went through this, you do it kind of chapter by chapter. You start with the architecture and you have the outline and then you do it chapter by chapter by chapter. And you don't do the beginning to end until it's finished. And then you do the beginning to end and you realize, but then that's what you have an editor for.

44:50And I will say that having a good editor was the most valuable. The two things that were really helpful. One was a great editor. And the second one was somebody helping you think about the proposal in the first place. Because so many of the things that we take as law in our business life are not true in that world. For example, how would you position this book competitively? competitively and we're trained to talk about how distinctive and different it is and this guy said yep that's good but how about how similar it is because if you're a publisher what you'd like is something that's similar to a book that's done really well but with a bit of a difference yes yeah and by the way it's not a zero-sum game you know you don't have to sell your book at the expense of another book people who buy books will buy whatever books they find interesting Things like that I found really helpful dealing with an expert.

45:45And then the editor was just so good at saying, nobody's going to understand what you mean by this. And his whole thing was just, with everything he read, was how is this going to look to somebody who knows nothing about the business of what you're doing? And it was really helpful, really helpful. So no, I don't think I'm going to do another one. You know, years ago, I don't know if you'll even remember this, you and I talked about doing a book together. We did. We did. And it was about the spaces people work in. Yes. And by the way, there's a bit of that in this current book, The Creative Shift.

46:20You talk about the importance of environment and so on. But we talked about doing sort of a coffee table book. I don't know, 25, 30 people we'd profile. It was a great idea. It was called The Corner Table Coffee. Yes. The Corner Office Coffee Table. And it was going to be photographs of CEOs' offices. and the game was going to be, you had to work out, there would be an index at the back. You had to work out whose office it was because all of them are a function of both the individual and the company. That was a great idea. It was probably a lot easier than writing a book about It would be. It would be.

46:56We may get a call about this after this podcast, Andrew. So brace yourself. You might have another book in you. Yeah. So you have at least two mantras, personal mantras. One is run toward fire and the other and just pick great bosses. So talk about each of those mantras, how they came to be a part of you. So the picking great bosses thing, which I really do think is fantastically important, but I only sort of realized that I'd done it retrospectively. I didn't at the time know that that was what I was doing, but it became really clear to me afterwards. And my definition of a great boss is somebody who is basically going to give you the benefit of the doubt and let you have the ball when you're probably not quite ready for it and will cover you if you drop it.

47:47But that's what's going to give you the chance to leap, to leap ahead. And I've had bosses who have definitely done that for me, including Robin and Alan when I was at WCRS, it didn't make sense to give a 29-year-old the job of CEO, but that was a moment where I was able to lead the head. And so that who's going to give you the 50-50 ball? Who's going to, as opposed to saying, you're not quite ready for this, I think is huge. And then cover you. I've talked about this about John Brennan a lot, which is he, as always - John's your current boss, for those who don't know. Yeah. Yeah, current and boss for the last 20-something years.

48:31He put you in the spotlight when things are going well and protected you from the searchlight when they don't. And that's a great boss. The running towards the fire thing, again, is I think that's how you make the leaps forward, which is to go for the things that nobody else wants to do and which are going to create a lot of help for your bosses, basically, or whoever, or your clients. Anybody can do the easy stuff. Anybody can do these stuff. But if you run towards the stuff that's hard and you solve it, you've taken a big problem off somebody's desk, big problem. And that, again, is how you're going to leap forward the level of responsibility that you've gotten and progress a lot faster than you might otherwise.

49:13How did you operationalize Run Toward the Fire as a CEO? Is it clients that you chose to spend personal time with or teams that were struggling? Yeah, clients, teams, and people, and agencies, you know, sometimes. sometimes there will be a problem with an agency or something. But you've got to learn to love problems. You'll learn to love problems because the further up in any organization you go, the more you're going to see them. And in fact, you end up with a rather sad situation was whenever somebody comes running into your office with really good news, you know that the next three people are going to bring you problems.

49:50You've got to learn to love them. You've got to learn to treat them as an opportunity to come up with a great solution, not as something that's one more problem for you to deal with. And I think that's the job of any, frankly, the job of any leader. That's what you spend your day doing. And if you don't learn to love them, it's a horrible job. If you do learn to love them, it can be fantastic. They're a reward. Growing up in Zimbabwe or South Africa, what do you remember as the first brand that made an impact on you? it's the light one the bright one that's martini i went to martini television commercials when i was five years old yeah that one's stuck here we are six years later and i can you were destined but that's funny i i remember the beer commercials as a kid but they were on a lot they had great music they were fun to watch yeah and they didn't have uh didn't have watershed hours in those days I can't speak to everybody.

50:50Staying on this for a minute, we're talking about your book today. What's a book that had an early impact on you? Well, Ogilvy on Advertising. You mentioned it earlier. Once I made that critical decision late at night in that nightclub, I quickly went and thought, I need to figure out something about this. And I read it. And I will say it's a book that I've reread on multiple occasions over the years because it's worth it. it's a great book. You've been a leader who's been very good at building relationships. We talked about that earlier in the show. What would you give to others on that front, especially the young people listening?

51:28I think it is this thing about put yourself in the position of the person you're trying to work. Really put yourself into their position. Start thinking about what you're trying to get out of this. Start really work to understand what matters to them. What matters to them on every level, what matters to them in their business, what's mattering to them in their lives. Because if you do that, if you do that, you're going to be able to help them. And if you can help them, you're going to be able to build trust. And if you can build trust, you can build respect. And if you do that, you can build affection.

52:02But right at the heart of it is, is make sure you really, really understand what that person wants, needs, is doing, with. And that's the key to helping. What's the campaign in your life that you've worked on or been part of that's been the most meaningful to you? I know we're not supposed to answer this question. I'm supposed to say, oh, they're all like your children. You love them all equally and all that stuff. I think the Snickers campaign, You're Not You When You're Hungry, is the most significant contribution that BBO has made to the world of advertising in the last 20 years. That's a big statement, by the way, you just made yeah and i and i'm talking you know there are lots of great campaigns in individual markets and there have been some other global but this was a camp this is a campaign that has been running for over a decade it's been running in more than 80 countries it took a brand from number seven in the market to number one without any change to the product and it doesn't matter who you talk to it doesn't matter who you talk to wherever you are all you've got to do is say you're not you and and people will finish the sentence and they'll start talking about ideas that they've seen that they like but also they start making them their own up so i i think that that for just breadth and depth and clarity is i think that's the biggest and best campaign we've done and it you know we say this a lot these days but this really did it became part of popular culture.

53:35It really did. And part of popular language. It is. And it did it for more than a moment. It wasn't a stunt. It wasn't something that happened once. It's over a decade. Andrew, last question. Who's been the most inspiring person in your life? And again, you're probably not supposed to answer this question, but I think David Abbott, who was the chairman of AMV, when AMV BBDO, when I joined, was the most remarkable person I've worked with. I mean, he just, he had so much talent. He was so sure of himself, or he actually wasn't, but he gave the impression that he was so sure of himself. And you just wanted to do your best.

54:24You just wanted to do your best. without him ever seeming to put any pressure on you you just felt that was what you had to do he was a remarkable i used to do this wonderful thing and it was all deliberate but whenever you had a big meeting or a big presentation you'd walk into the presentation room and david would be sitting he was always there before anybody else and he'd be sitting there reading a novel and when you walked in he would close the novel and look out and it was so brilliant because no matter how big the meeting was, how big the pitch was, everybody went in and they thought, oh, it's okay.

55:03He's got it. He's got it. Everything's going to be all right. He's sitting there reading a book. He's reading a piece of fiction before this major meeting. That's good. The image of that's beautiful. It really is. It really was remarkable. And it was all by design. All by design. It was like a swan underneath. The legs were going crazy. But all you could see on top was swan. It was incredible. Well, Andrew, thank you for this. I knew it would be a fun conversation. It would be enlightening. And it was all of that. And you're a special human being. I've known you for a long time. And I have a lot of respect, affection, admiration for you and trust.

55:41So thank you for the gift of the book. Thank you for the gift of this conversation. And I can't wait to see you in person, which we will soon. Yes, indeed. All the facts. Thank you, Jim. I've really enjoyed it as always. That was my conversation with Andrew Robertson. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. The first one, when Andrew was talking about how his agency had an impact beyond the marketing function and to companies at large, he talked about building trust first, which leads to respect, which leads to affection. That's such a wonderful concept. Build trust, which earns respect, which then earns affection.

56:22That's how he has been effective at BBDO, and that's how that company has been so effective with so many companies well beyond the marketing and advertising world. Second takeaway, run toward the fire as a mantra for a leader and especially for a senior leader. Andrew talked about there's a lot of stuff that's easy that would be easy for a leader to do, but that truly distinguished leaders, and he says this is one of his goals, is go where the problems are. Run toward the fire. Run toward the difficult stuff, whether it's a difficult client, a tough business challenge, a difficult people issue, or a difficult team.

56:55Run toward the fire is a mantra. I love it. And last one, and we told the stories in the book, and Andrew told the story in the show, and that's how he let his people early in his days at BBDO describe the kind of culture where they could thrive and where they can make an impact. He let them do it, and he pulled together some people, let them do it in their words, And because of that, because they were describing the culture they want to be a part of that does excellent work, that stuck and that became a pivotal part of Andrew's contribution in his 20 years and a pivotal part of how BBDO had an exceptional run as a top creative organization on the planet.

57:37That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel, nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.